Lord Hani, who had been watching her, nodded critically and asked me if the gift suited: if so he would dismiss the bearers.
I said that it did, and he dismissed the girl and her attendants to the side of the room where they waited like so many jars of oil, and the bearers and pipe-players and drummers back whence they came, and minced over to sit beside me with a smug and satisfied air.
My wife, strangely enough considering that she had almost certainly slipped away previously to make arrangements to return some token of Hatti’s esteem, apologized for our lack of suitable rejoinder, and promised in a venomously polite tone to send forth something equally as “wondrous” when she returned to Hattusas.
I was thinking, chin on fist, about whether or not the black girl with the heart shaped face and the almond eyes had truly been as tall as I myself was, or only seemed it.
I was prudent enough not to attempt to find out that evening, but when at last I had a moment to myself, three days later, it developed that she was about a hand’s breadth shorter than I.
Ah, one more item of interest that pertains to that evening in Alashiya:
Whilst I was busy being considerate to my wife, the Amurrite forsook his chair. None could recall the moment of his leave-taking; no announcement was made by him. And since Hani apparently had one more thing to say to this Aziru that he had forgotten, a thorough search of the premises was instigated at his insistence. Inner and outer guards were queried, but none had seen the Amurrite leave. In fact, while we were finding that out it became clear that none had passed him into the palace: they were still expecting him, both the Alashiyan palace master and the unaccountable number of Egyptians these inquiries turned up.
The next day, Piyassilis and I found a grapple swinging from the portico’s most secluded corner, and I thought that if I had been him I would have done the same, did I suspect, as he must have, a trap. And from what I saw when they lost him, I would say he was not in error.
CHAPTER 19
It was in my twelfth regnal year that word came up from Egypt that the Good Gods were building a “wondrous” City-of-Rejoicing-in-the-Horizon, and in so short a time as a year would move their entire court there. Now, why the Egyptian kings wished to retire from Thebes – whose magnificence was supposed to make the opulence of the palace at Ugarit and even Tyre’s fabled spires seem tawdry – I could not imagine. Just which of the royal personages had precipitated the move was abundantly clear: the younger Amenhotep, Naphuria had settled into his kingship. And if not mad, he was indeed strange, or at least in a mystical way intriguing: building a metropolis to his god Aten on a camel-track. But as rumors of the City-of-the-Horizon became serious consideration, and more and more of Egypt’s attention was focused on raising this whim of their Pharaohs’ from the mud, I myself was just completing my own preparations: While the Two Lands were otherwise engaged, I was going to relieve them of the burden of their unconscionably abrasive neighbor: I was going after Tushratta of Mitanni. So down from Hattusas went my determination, out to my vassals on this side and on that. I had been three years obtaining enough Alashiyan copper and Kizzuwadnan silver and Arzawaean tin to build up my armory; I had troop levies in the thousands from those countries newly Hittite, yet I added Sutu and Hapiru and bedawin fighters and paid for them with taxes from the countries they were assigned to ‘protect’.
All this I did so that I could take three hundred chariots and a thousand men down through the Kizzuwadnan pass into Mitanni, and find something left of my empire when I returned.
I had posted Kizzuwadnan levies in Arzawa and Arzawaeans upon the border of Hayasa, so that none would be tempted by the sight of their homes, and all the various novices we had schooled so that the plain beyond Hattusas looked like a battlefield two years running and the streets of the city were filled with foreign accents and costumes as varied as those I had seen on Alashiya. Almost.
I would think longingly of the days when a bad faring of one of my commanders was all I needed to slip my shackles and hitch up my cart. An empire such as fate had rendered me is buttressed by the bastions of its ruler’s personality; bastions by their nature must be unmoving, else they inspire no trust. It took yearly more preparation for me to hunt a stag, let alone wage a war in person.
To all who advised me of these truths, I seemed resigned. And I was resigned to wait until I had massed enough strength and honed my weapons, and even told them when we first returned from Alashiya that I would wait the three years time and at the end of it I would move.
The Shepherd and my wife and my chamberlain accepted that with relief, and made no move to obstruct me as I continued to prepare. Until just before the final winter whose spring would see the forming up of troops, Hattusas seemed of one mind, man, priest, king and god. But then the omens started to go bad.
Not only the omina that could be manipulated, but things I saw with my own eyes or did with my own hand went inexplicably awry. For example, in the sacrifice to dead queens that Khinti performed, one of the lamb’s livers was yellow and stinking and the blood from its slit throat would not flow. We asked if this was because the queen was pregnant, and the omen was unfavorable. We asked if they were unhappy because we had omitted Asmunikal from the sacrifice to dead queens, and the omen was unfavorable. We put the deported queen in her place and reperformed the entire sacrifice. “Are the gods conciliated?” “No. The omen is still unfavorable.” I heard that so often I tried asking if the sun would rise on the morrow. The omen to that was unfavorable, though the sun rose, which led some to conjecture that we as the stewards and stewardesses of the gods had done something so terrible that none of us were pleasing in their sight. Now, that “we” was the whole of the temple of the Storm God and that of the Sun Goddess in Hattusas. So we sent to Arinna to have the priests there do some investigating, and what they said back to us was very vague but definitely unfavorable.
Now, life cannot stop because the omens are unfavorable.
It bothered me, that this be an ill time for divination, but not very much. Not like it bothered the Shepherd. I had a military campaign shaping slowly in my hands, two sons now men and with the armies, my sharpening interest in affairs on the coast of Syria. All the jostling and bustlings of the rich and justly famous little port Tyre; of rosy-cheeked Sidon whose palace gleams with red marble; of the cowering monarchy of Ugarit, so afraid for her libraries and her esthetes sensibilities: all can be understood in proper perspective based on a single observation: Amurru lies between Ugarit and Egypt who administrates and protects “all Upper and Lower Retenu”. And Amurru was a lion lying among calves, a lion who has seen the Great Bull of Egypt, their father, in his pasture, and is cautioned but not deterred thereby.
I had exchanged one letter with Abdi-asirta. The man was cautious in the extreme. But he was Aziru’s father, and I had liked well enough what I saw in the youth to deem his sire a kindred spirit to myself, if only in my private thoughts.
I was following his exploits through my Duttu, who yet scribed for Amenhotep, with all the eager delight of a youth at his first flame-lit reminiscence of soldiers’ feats. At that moment, the King of Ugarit was weeping all over the clay on which he begged Egyptian support against this Amurrite who was nibbling away at his merchants’ prosperity on land and sea, and even at his very borders. Well would I have liked to have the depradacious Amurrite under my sovereignty. I suggested this to him openly, which is perhaps why he wrote me no more after that initial exchange.
Not easily offended in such matters, I waited awhile, and thought. Probably by the time I rode down through the Gates into Mitanni, Aziru would have waked to find moored in Amurru’s harbor a slim dagger of a vessel, crafted by Alashiya’s most gifted shipwright, unmarked by any identifying design. I hoped he enjoyed it; I was in no doubt he would conjecture whence it came.
Although Aziru was only a few years older than Arnuwandas, he was no more than a decade younger than I. I had more hope for wooing the son, who with the squeeze of meaning
ful years after twenty would soon seem my contemporary, than for his father, who must be gray-haired and whose temper promised that he would not live to see it change to white.
I am not a self-effacing man, yet even I had been taken aback at the audacious nature of Aziru’s father’s kingly deeds. I, were I ruling that little precarious strip of land, might have been more cautious. There has always been a country Amurru. But it had no seaboard when my father’s father ruled. It was said that Abdi-asirta’s swelling populace was composed partly of Hapiru, and if those homeless found welcome with him in exchange for military service, then that was no different than I had done. But the drama of the little warrior-prince and the great Pharaohs of Egypt seemed to be taking a turn for the worse, and though I wished him well, I could not take a hand unless invited, which I was not. So, like a man who bets on a team’s racing season, I followed with anticipation the trials of the Egyptian governors of ‘Lower Retenu’ at the hands of the King of Amurru.
So enamored of my intelligence and the entertainments it provided did I become that I remarked to Hattu-ziti that it would please me if I could be kept informed of seaboard affairs even while I was on campaign.
It was when we had devised a way to do this that the omens had started behaving inexplicably, until I snarled at Khinti: “Then make them right! Lie, contrive, falsify, but make the indications favorable. Now!”
And she trembled for I was in my worst temper, during which no thing or person is truly safe, and fled.
When I calmed, I fled myself, up to the rock sanctuary where the black eagle nested, to see what he would advise.
I shot a fat hare through the hind so it would yet be alive when I reached the ledge, and climbed up with the twitching thing tied to my belt, its warm blood trickling down my leg.
I saw him not, only the brindle lady bird who kept his company. She dived without even a hesitation, straight for my eyes. I fended her off, taking only gashes in my forearms while I sought to protect my face, and she beat upward screaming. That had never happened to me before.
I watched her, soaring in circles, lest she drop from the sky on me and slowly hitched myself up the rock, until I could peer into the nest.
My black eagle was there, his feathers dull and fluttering, maggots crawling pale between them, flies walking on his staring eye. Great bloody gashes he had sustained in some awful battle; one wing was half torn from his breast.
I found my grip slippery, and when I lowered myself to the rock shelf, I was trembling. A short time after, .I gave up the contents of my stomach. The hare still twitched weakly on my belt. I wrung its neck and tossed it over the edge of the shelf, and thought the black eagle died a valiant death, had even made it back to his roost with such dire wounds, and no Hero could ask more than that. But I was wracked with a chill colder than the stone beneath me, and yet I stayed there until night came and went away again, and I had decided what I would do.
What I decided to do was: nothing. I told no one of the eagle’s death; its discovery was inevitable, but the connection I had long assumed between the eagle’s life and mine was known to no one but me. To all else he was simply an eagle sacred to dead kings, not live ones. And that mighty fighter would not have wanted his defeat to keep me, his brother, immured in Hattusas.
There is a thing about secrets: the weight of them grows daily.
Though none questioned to my face my overnight disappearance, my agitation went not unnoticed in the palace. And as our departure into the land of my most-reviled enemy, Tushratta of Mitanni loomed closer, I found that the weight of the black eagle’s death bowed my back so that instead of seeing always the horizon, the ground upon which I trod was shown to me in ever finer detail. I walked the palace yards with my Queen, and reliefs adorning the foundation stones of buildings among which I had played as a child took on a sudden poignant beauty, as if I had never seen them before.
We were sitting, she and I, with our backs to one of the man-long limestone oblongs.
“We have ten days, my husband. Ten days only, and then begins the long season’s vigil. Every hurried tread in the halls will stop my heart. Every incoming dispatch will take away my appetite as surely as dreams of you will divest me of my sleep.”
“Those things are not happening to you now? I go out to war to escape them, to shut forever Tushratta’s mouth, whose words make little of my might before all the courts of kings. Rest easy. When I return we will build a winter palace on the Mala river, down where the Storm God’s reign is gentle, and you can eat of those warm-weather cucumbers and the hearts of lotus. And all those other things you have pined for, that misted your eyes when we were on Alashiya, all those will be there for your pleasure.”
“Do you think I care for nuts and eucalyptus so passionately? Shall I trade my lover for a stand of cypress, my unborn child,” she cupped her rounding belly, “for bolts of gauze? I would rather stay in Hattusas evermore, in snow drifts so deep a horse could not walk through them, than see you off to one more assignation with the gods of the netherworld.”
“Then come with me,” I said, knowing full well that she could not do that.
She turned her face away, and took quick breaths; and said, “You tease me cruelly, my Sun.”
So I had to convince her that I did not mean to tease, and the conversation drifted to the naming of the child she nurtured, which irked me though I did not show it, irked me because I expected to be back in Hattusas long before the birth was due, and yet we were speaking about it as if I might not, come back at all.
So it went, with the shade of the black eagle ever circling, his spirit wings throwing dark shadows about my head, and I found that my mouth went dry as we spoke of fitting names, and that my ardor as regards my wife was much increased.
It is not my practice, nor any man of moralities, to penetrate a woman well gone toward bearing. I had filled those evenings since Khinti’s conception with my concubines, each of whom, after all, deserves at least one spawn from the man to whose pleasure her life has been dedicated without her consent, if only so that the child will fill the remainder of her empty days. Some of them I had sent away: to the winter palace in Kumanni or to the Salt Lake, or to the estates the king uses when on tours with the gods. Some, six in fact, I had passed to my eldest on his successful completion of his manhood ceremony, which gave him a total of eight, including the Alashiyan maiden whose father was a shipmaster and the black maidservant of my tall ebony girl.
These he kept in with mine while on the site of the ‘palace of the grandfather’ renovations were being completed. Since we had no grandfather to install there, I had commanded it remade to suit my princes. Therein would each of my sons upon his assumption of the duties of manhood be able to reign in private over the fruits thereof.
For the present, Arnuwandas who the troops called ‘Hartaga,’ which means Bear, was living in Samuha with the armies, as I had done. It is as good a place as any to learn the trade of war, though despite my wishes it was somewhat of a trap: he was my official successor, tuhkanti, Crown Prince, and though he was a good warrior I was not about to risk him and myself both in one engagement.
Piyassilis, on the other hand, I was taking out on campaign. Although his manhood rites had been undergone without the flamboyance my eldest displayed, it was Piyassilis and not Arnuwandas who had the soul of the armies in him. Stolid, silent, self-counseling Piyassilis was without doubt the best fledgling charioteer training in Hattusas, and there was not one fourteen or fifteen or sixteen-year old Hattian soldier who would not have killed to win a place in a unit he commanded. All thought I would do that – give him his own command of ten, at least. I had been a commander at sixteen, though, and recollected the discomfort of station unearned and responsibility unclear until death inscribes its reality upon the heart. I put Piyassilis in a driver’s slot among my thirty, which was a perilous and honorific enough assignment for a young man skilled as he, neither too light for his pride nor too heavy for his years.
H
e came to me soon after I gave out troop assignments and hovered unspeaking in the chancery where Hattu-ziti and I were digging our way out from under the inevitable mountain of last-moment details that humps up from the smooth plain of the most cautiously conceived and methodically undertaken engagements when so many lives and borders are involved.
Finally, distracted by my son’s berobed lingering in corners and his numerous journeyings unto the very verge of speech, I demanded of him what it was he wanted.
“Abuya, I did not mean to interfere.” He only called me ‘father’ when he was troubled enough to forget his manly dignity.
“Hattu-ziti, let us have wine, and lay this aside.”
My chamberlain scratched his thinning pate and stumbled up from the floor with exaggerated difficulty, muttering about aging joints and cold weather, saying he would be glad enough when he could order the armies out from some tropical palace on the Mala’s banks. To Hattu-ziti, as regards my efficacy in the waging of war, it was as if my word became fact upon speaking. I had said I would do it: to Hattu-ziti it was already done, only not yet noticed, like a beheaded corpse in a chariot that drives a length or two before realizing it is dead.
When the wine was brought, it loosened Piyassilis’ tongue and eased his stiffness, and he said that if I could find the time, one of the teams he had been training had “graduated” and he would like me to see them.
Piyassilis’ love for horses, and his way with them, was more than the infatuation that all boys endure and later transfer to women. His was a talent as sure as the ancient sculptor’s who carved the larger-than-man sphinxes yet guarding the lower city gate.
The horses were scions of the black team I had taken from Tuthaliyas’ stable when they shipped me off to Samuha, the same black team I had later given Arnuwandas and which he had lost while about acquiring the appellation “The Bear.” These horses were born white, surely, for their legs and manes and tails were black, but their flanks and barrels were dappled with rings of grey and on their proud necks white still showed.
I, the Sun Page 28
